Recent Books -- Erasure, Gideon the Ninth, The Cloud Revolution, We Shall Be Masters, Eighteen Days, Right Kind of Wrong

12 January 2024

Erasure by Percival Everett. What a blast, super smart, fun structure. I am excited to the see the film inspired by it, American Fiction.
Gideon the Ninth by Tasmyn Muir. Kind of fun romp thru some far future/fantastical world. Could use a little bit more pacing, it is a constant lurch from crisis to crisis, and I would have enjoyed a little more character development.
The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s by Mark P. Mills. Kind of a mess of a book. Some interesting ideas about future technology opportunities, but some giant holes – where is the discussion of space technologies? And what is the thesis of this book? I thought it would be about the cloud, but it was a bunch of random tech stuff, and some handwavey ideas about policy. I really liked an earlier book by this author, but won’t take much away from this.
We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin by Chris Miller. Centuries of failed Russian ambitions in Asia, a bunch of history I did not know.
Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East by Uri Kaufman. A lot of modern Israel history that I did not fully know. War is a complete cluster**.
Right Kind of Wrong by Amy C. Edmondson. I wanted to really like this, and it is ok, but it kind of drags. The basic idea is to use the scientific method more broadly in life, and be very methodical and intellectually honest about failures. All good stuff but maybe was just an article.